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On emptying seas, a vanishing way of life
Overfishing on the Mediterranean is threatening artisanal fishermen and endangering more than 100 marine species.
from the January 16, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
Twice as many fish are caught in the Mediterranean today than in 1950. The Mediterranean alone cannot provide enough fish to meet local needs. Southern Europeans eat significantly more fish than the global average of 35 pounds per person annually. Spaniards consume 90 pounds a year, while Italians, French, and Greeks, eat almost 45 pounds – much of which is imported. Though catches are down from their mid-1980s peak, the fact that fishermen expend greater effort to catch fewer fish indicates that stocks are overexploited. Trawling has been identified as the most environmentally destructive type of fishing here.
"The fundamental problem is that the sea is not managed with the objective of conservation, or rational management of the resource, but mostly in the short-term interest of those few fishermen who take as much as they can," says Alessandro Gianni, a fisheries campaigner with Greenpeace, whom Pisanu contacted for help. "The more economically profitable ... [push] out the smaller artisanal fishermen."
Gianni Usai, regional director of Legapesca, the largest local fisherman's cooperative in Cabras, was one of the first locals to recognize that there was a problem. Twenty years ago, he began to notice that lobster catches were declining, from 10 tons a year in the mid-1980s to between 3 and 4 tons in the early 1990s. Today, local fishermen catch less than half a ton. But for years, his warnings were ignored.
"When there's a fire in the woods ... everyone is upset and goes and stops it. In the sea, it's like there's been a fire forever, but no one does a thing," says Mr. Usai.
A solution: marine parks
One solution to overfishing that is increasingly being considered by environmental groups and even fishing groups like Legapesca is the creation of marine parks. Those would ban or severely limit fishing. A pilot project near Cabras to create a protected area for lobsters to breed has had some success, says Usai.
But while there's general agreement that Mediterranean fishing needs to be curtailed, attempts to do so have sputtered in the region's unique political and biological environment. In part because of the sea's rich biodiversity, the vast majority of fishing here does not target specific species. With the exception of a few boats that focus on high-value fish, like bluefin tuna and swordfish, most fishermen scoop up whatever their nets happen to catch. This makes conservation techniques used elsewhere, such as catch quotas, largely ineffective.
And with 21 countries, plus the Palestinian territories, bordering the sea and sharing its resources, political agreements can be hard to arrive at.
"The particular thing about the Mediterranean is that most of the waters are international waters," says Susanna St. Trappa, a fisheries expert with World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "Every solution must come with consensus and to reach consensus with 21 countries is a very big task."
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